Little but a spirit
Costly and volatile
Am
I, want of my touch unstoppers
Now that you suffer it.
James Merrill
THE DOP PELGANGER
In that still street where I have never walked
No craze of moonlight frosts the window panes,
No iron gateway whistles in the wind,
No cloth reveals a tale in coffee stains.
I was not there and never closed the doors.
No postman could have found her anywhere
Who could not hear the clash of absent wars.
No spider spins its web beneath the stair.
No footfalls in the hall were ever known,
Not known the measured, breathless, steep ascent;
The moment never came, has never gone.
There was no disappointment, no intent.
No owl was puckered for its night-long note,
No squinty bats performed their drunken race.
By that address there was no one to dote
Upon the moon, my sorrows in
his
face.
He was not there, and did not curse that house
Or bite his lips, and so he never said :
I live within another consciousness,
Where I am not, I waken from the dead.
Robert Pack
